Oct 12, 2021

Productive Play: How Computer Gaming Benefits Our Careers 👾 - Issue #7

By How Remote Works • Issue #7 • View online

Hi everyone,

Welcome to our seventh bi-weekly newsletter about remote work.

Productive Play: How Computer Gaming Benefits Our Careers

My friend Mike shared the following observation with me:

Art Lapinsch

@artlapinsch

@andreasklinger Recently had a chat w/ @hammer_mt who's co-founder used to be ProGamer and he said that there's a strong correlation between (1) being good at gaming and (2) being good at remote.

Both involves being productive in front of a glass box.

Brownie points for MPG experience 🍪

4:28 PM - 28 Sep 2021

The reality is that in 2021 many aspects of life resemble computer gaming:

Nik

@NikMilanovic

Sometimes it's weird to remember that we're all effectively competing to hit the right keys on our keyboards in the right order, and that if we do it for long enough we can buy a house.

7:29 PM - 7 May 2021

Takeaway: Gaming Can Be Beneficial

In the past, I have written about the similarity of education and gaming for personal and career development.

In this issue, I’d like to focus on gaming for work. Particularly, for remote teams.

Shopify Party: Bringing Mario Party-Energy to Work

Shopify recently announced that they developed a computer game in-house.

Daniel Beauchamp

@pushmatrix

We built an internal game at Shopify to make virtual hangouts more fun. It’s called Shopify Party, and I’d love to tell you all about it 👇🏻
[1/6] https://t.co/DwzxwWty3V

3:09 PM - 28 Sep 2021

Why is this interesting?

Well, for starters, Shopify is an e-commerce platform company. They are not in the business of computer game development.

But…

At the same time, Shopify has a remote workforce of 7000+ employees who want to feel connected with their colleagues.

That’s why Shopify prioritized this seemingly unrelated project.

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Two Decades Later: Party Mode Is Still Wassup

Professional Gaming Platform: A Billion Dollar Opportunity

You can view the following section through two lenses:

🖥 Professional: Draw ideas for your own company/team
💡 Entrepreneur: Build a business with these ideas

Let’s have a look at why this could be beneficial for remote teams at large 👇

Shopify Party: Focus on Employee Affinity

Here’s how Daniel from Shopify described the purpose of this project:

There are many tools for virtual hangouts, but most focus on using video chat to recreate the office experience.

We wanted to give people a break from video-fatigue, and make a space designed for social play and being silly. [2/6]

The goal is to reduce the affinity distance between colleagues 👇

Figure from our email-based course "The 80/20 of Remote Team Leadership"

Further Applications: From Brain Gym to Onboarding Sequences

Here are a couple of ideas how gaming could fit into the professional context:

🧠 Brain Gym: Mini games to exercise your brain (memory games; matching games; etc.)
🎮 Skill Games: Simulator-style games optimized to improve a professional skill (e.g. Marketing Mix Modelling training for marketing analysts via a simulator game)
🤔 Onboarding Tutorials: Think of your first week at work. Instead of having check-ins with HR, you go through a tutorial game sequence. Similar to how computer game developers do it.

Our prediction: in the coming years we will see a billion-dollar business that focuses on professional gaming.

There’s an additional idea at play: mental state. You’ve probably heard about the importance of flow states for creativity and work. Many professionals struggle to achieve that when they need to complete a work project but dip into this state with ease when they are playing:

visa is stretching (hips)

@visakanv

I lay down on the sofa looking like the guy on the left, and then this image came to mind, and now I'm wide awake and looking like the guy on the right

fuckin wild https://t.co/pTbFtmc1o0

1:14 PM - 5 Oct 2021

If we can harness this energy for work we could either be more efficient (equally as productive in a two-day workweek) or be more effective (get significantly more done in a 40hr workweek).

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Four Steps to Manage Documentation Overwhelm

Recently I got the following questions: How to avoid documentation/information overwhelm?

In short:

Standardization 🏭
Search 🔍
Review Cycles 🔁
Curation 📚

I put together a 7-minute video where I go into a bit more detail and show how to curate information in a Notion workspace 👇

How to Find the Right Information in Your Documentation

Please let me know if this type of content is helpful to you.

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Early Bird Offer: Documentation Course 📒

We are inching closer to the final release of The 80/20 of Remote Team Leadership 🏝 - our email-based course about documentation for remote teams.

If you are looking to enable your team through clean documentation, then you can still benefit from our 50% off discount via this link 👇